Category: judicial appointments commission

‘Almost two-thirds of lawyers recommended to become judges in the past year attended state schools, according to the first social mobility statistics released by the judicial appointments commission (JAC).’

‘Twenty one new deputy High Court judges were appointed yesterday, of whom a third were women – among them a senior government solicitor, the vice-chair of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and an academic.’

‘The rate at which women are being appointed judges is gathering momentum in a “snowball effect”, ensuring gender equality on the bench is not that far away despite remarks by supreme court justice Jonathan Sumption – so says a female judge involved in judicial selection.’

‘Solicitors were the least successful group of people applying for judicial appointment over the last six months, and the situation is getting worse, the latest figures from the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) have shown.’

‘In April 2014 Sadiq Khan, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, asked Karon Monaghan QC and Geoffrey Bindman QC to review the options for a future Labour Government to improve diversity in the judiciary. On November 6th their report, entitled “Judicial Diversity: Accelerating change”, was published. Starting from the premise that “[t]he near absence of women and Black, Asian and minority ethnic judges in the senior judiciary is no longer tolerable”, it proposes a range of recommendations designed to speed up the glacial pace of change. Perhaps the most controversial of these is for the introduction of a quota system for women and BAME candidates. The report reviews the use of quotas in other UK institutions as well as their use in judicial appointments processes around the world, before addressing the question of whether such quotas would be lawful under EU law. This is a key question: EU law casts a long shadow in this context, as the Monaghan and Bindman report makes clear, given that any legislation enacted in Westminster to give effect to a quota system in the process of judicial appointments must conform to the requirements of EU law.’
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